Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (2024)

Historically, anarchism arose not only as an explanation of the gulf between the rich and the poor in any community, and of the reason why the poor have been obliged to fight for their share of a common inheritance, but as a radical answer to the question ‘What went wrong?’ that followed the ultimate outcome of the French Revolution.

Colin Ward (1924-2010) (Wiki photo)

This entry in the Oxford VSI series was written, not by an academic political theorist, but by a gentleman who was for decades the face of British anarchism, Colin Ward.

As Ken Worpole wrote in Ward’s obituary for the Guardian,

Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, lived with the title of Britain's most famous anarchist for nearly half a ¬century, bemused by this ambivalent soubriquet. In Anarchy in Action (1973), he set out his belief that an anarchist society was not an end goal. Following Alexander Herzen, the writer and thinker known as the "father of -Russian socialism", Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be ¬discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening ¬co-operative ¬relations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms.

Following is a chapter by chapter review of what Ward has presented in this VSI. The first chapter is in fact a very very short introduction, not only to the book but to the subject; hence I’ve presented rather more detail for that chapter than for the remainder of the book.

Ch. 1 Definitions and Ancestors From the Greek ‘anarkhia’, “contrary to authority or without a ruler”. Used derogatively until 1840 when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his political/social ideology. Anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both liberalism and socialism, and “the differing strands of anarchist thought can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these.”

Ward starts off by mentioning several different sorts of anarchist thinker.

“The mainstream of anarchist propaganda for more than a century has been anarchist communism [note the small ‘c’; this is communism in the sense of ‘community’; also note that Ward uses ‘propaganda’ here, and elsewhere, in the non-pejorative sense: ‘the particular doctrines or principles propagated by an organization or movement’], which argues that property in land , natural resources, and the means of production should be held in mutual control by local communities, federating for innumerable joint purposes with other communes.” Further, “Some anarchists prefer to distinguish between anarchist-communism and collectivist anarchism in order to stress the obviously desirable freedom of an individual or family to possess the resources needed for living, while not implying the right to own the resources needed by others.”

“Anarcho-syndicalism puts its emphasis on the organized industrial workers who could, through a ‘social general strike’, expropriate the possessors of capital and thus engineer a workers’ take-over of industry and administration.”

“There are several traditions of individualist anarchism”, one deriving from the German Max Stirner, and another from a series of 19th-century Americans, “who argued that in protecting our own autonomy and associating with others for common advantages, we are promoting the good of all.”

“Pacifist anarchism follows both from the anti-militarism that accompanies rejection of the state, with its ultimate dependence on armed forces, and from the conviction that any morally viable human society depends upon the uncoerced goodwill of its members.” (my emphasis)

Ward says that for the anarchist, the state itself is the enemy; not only because the state is always watching, but because (even more so) the state is the guardian of the powerful in society. But a broader theme links all these threads of anarchist thought:

… their rejection of external authority, whether that of the state, the employer, of the hierarchies of administration and of established institutions like the school and the church. The same is true of more recently emerging varieties of anarchist propaganda, green anarchism and anarcha-feminism.

(Noam Chomsky agrees. In Understanding Power he states his view that whenever a person or institution exerts authority over another person or group, that authority must be capable of being justified. No form of authority or domination of hierarchy has “prior justification”, that is, justification by simply saying “of course, that’s understood to be the case.” “The burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it – invariably.”)

Ward mentions four thinkers who have long been thought connected to the anarchist tradition (later in the book he refers to them as “my 19th-century mentors”). William Goodwin (1756-1836 – the partner of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley); Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65, the first to call himself an anarchist); Michael Bakunin (1814-76, the Russian revolutionary who became famous for his disputes with Marx in the First International in the 1870s); and Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). Kropotkin is the most widely read, on a global scale, of all anarchist authors; his most famous work is The Conquest of Bread.

On anarchism’s enduring resilience:

Every European, North American, Latin American, and Asian society has had its anarchist publicists, journals, circles of adherents, imprisoned activists, and martyrs. Whenever an authoritarian and repressive political regime collapses, the anarchists are there, a minority urging their fellow citizens to absorb the lessons of the sheer horror and irresponsibility of government.

How is it, then, that with anarchism having been presented the world over as a serious political and social choice, by so many thoughtful writers, over such a long period, ‘anarchism’ has such a bad reputation as it does in some societies? From my own experience, I know well that in the U.S. at least, and perhaps elsewhere, ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchism’ have long been scare words. The image is always of bomb-throwing maniacs, a complete lack of societal order, utter chaos, every man for himself.

Ward traces this caricature of anarchism to the short period a century ago “when a minority of anarchists, like the subsequent minorities of a dozen other political movements, believed that the assassination of monarchs, princes, and presidents would hasten popular revolution”. These anarchists were no more successful than most subsequent political assassins. “But their legacy has been the cartoonist’s stereotype … and has provided another obstacle to the serious discussion of anarchist approaches.”

Here’s a brief rundown on some of the other chapters in the book.

Ch 2. Revolutionary moments Topics herein are the anarchist elements in the European revolutions of 1848; 20th century revolutions (Mexico, Russia), and an extended discussion of anarchist activities and achievements in Spain during the 1936-39 Civil War.
See also comment 16 below

Ch 3. States, societies, and the collapse of socialismand Ch 4. Deflating nationalism and fundamentalism These two chapters didn’t impress me very much, perhaps from lack of application on my part. The first seems to be a rambling essay on the difference between society and the state, the ultimate failure of 20th century “socialism”, and how anarchist ideas might be applied to the evolving 21st century forms of society. I didn’t really understand (no doubt some in Europe would) quite how he came to the conclusion that “socialism” had failed to achieve (or at least approach) its goals. Nor did I understand why he steadfastly insisted on criticizing socialism instead of Communism (which he mostly seems to ignore). Perhaps his point is that the anarchist simply knows that no matter how well-meaning the intentions, the modern bureaucratic societal structures are simply too large to ever work in an efficient and just manner. As for Chapter 4, one quote will perhaps give an indication of what his concern is: “It is disappointing and unexpected for secular anarchists, who thought that wars of religion belonged to the past, now to have to confront issues of the recognition of difference, while they are trying to move on to the issues that unite rather than divide us.’ [The book was published in 2004, so we can guess what he’s talking about.]

Ch 5. Containing deviancy and liberating work “Containing deviancy” actually is an ironic phrase (I take it) because the first part of the chapter is about prisons, people who are in prisons but shouldn’t be (the ultimate exercise of the state’s authority over the individual), suicide rates in prison, and so forth. The last part of the chapter addresses issues relating to the modern workplace, unions, and other labor structures in the modern state; and concludes that although the decades-old expectations of the anarcho-syndicalists, “who envisaged a triumphant take-over of the factory by its workers” may now seem a forlorn hope, these aspirations “are close to the dreams of vast numbers of citizens who feel trapped by the culture of employment.”

Ch. 6 Freedom in education This seems to be an important chapter, but as an American reader I found it confusing in parts, because of the lengthy historical section on British “private” schools for working class children in the mid-nineteenth century. Ward says that “The anarchist approach has been more influential in education than in most other fields of life”, and seems satisfied that education is on the right track and getting better. I wonder what he would think, however, if he thought for even a few moments on the American model, which in recent years has seemed to become increasingly under the autocracy of testing. Even the seemingly well-meaning goal of preparing children for “life” and the “real world” can be cynically seen as simply preparing the best of the young to take whatever places they can find in the corporate kingdom, with the rest being over-educated and over-indebted for the employment scraps left over.

These sorts of problems should be prime targets for anarchist solution-seeking. But there isn’t much in the system now to cause anarchists to rest on their supposed “more influential” third-place ribbons earned in the U.S. educational system.

Ch. 7 The individualist response I found this chapter quite agreeable. I’ve often thought the Libertarians in the U.S. seemed more like (the bad type of) anarchists than anything else. Without going into Ward’s analysis, I’ll just quote from the beginning and the end of the chapter:

(beginning) For a century, anarchists have used the word ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist’, both as a noun and as an adjective … However, much more recently the word has been appropriated [he could have said “usurped”] by various American free marker philosophers … so it is necessary to examine the modern individualist ‘libertarian’ response from the standpoint of the anarchist tradition.
o o o
(at the end) The American ‘libertarians’ of the 20th century are academics rather than social activists, and their inventiveness seems to be limited to providing an ideology for untrammeled market capitalism.

Ch. 8 Quiet revolutions is one in which I think my attention lagged. At least I didn't underline much, and when I finally got around to much later writing this review I said nothing about it. However,
see Comment 16 below.

Ch. 9 The federalist agenda revived my interest, and was even a bit inspiring. In it Ward returns to three of the 19th century anarchists from the first chapter: Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. He examines a number of observations of these writers, who “had a federalist agenda that was a foretaste of modern debates on European unity.” What he’s talking about is the rise of the nation state in the 19th century, particularly with the unification of Germany and Italy, who had “left behind all those silly little principalities, republics, papal provinces, and city states, to become nation states, empires, and, of course, conquerors.” He goes on,

In the great tide of nationalism in the 19th century there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging the alternative of federalism. It is interesting, at least, that those whose names survive were the three best-known anarchist thinkers of that century …
[and, several pages later]
After every kind of disastrous experience in the 20th century, the rulers of the nation states of Europe have directed policy towards several kinds of supranational entities. The crucial issue that faces them is whether to conceive of a Europe of States or a Europe of Regions.

A resolution has been adopted by the council of Europe, calling for national governments to adopt its Charter for Local Self-Government, ‘to formalize commitment to the principle that government functions should be carried out at the lowest level possible and only transferred to higher government by consent.’

This precept is an extraordinary tribute to Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and the ideas that they were alone in voicing (apart from some interesting Spanish thinkers like Pi y Margall or Joaquin Costa).

Ch. 10. Green aspirations and anarchist futures is a fine conclusion to the book. In it Ward writes about the limits to growth; environmental issues relating to the high cost of the rich world’s ‘cheap’ food; urban intensive food production, as in Singapore; Peter Harper’s distinction, not between Deep Ecologists and Social Ecologists, but between Light Greens (concerned with new technology of efficient energy, and “sustainable” consumption) and Deep Greens (small insulated houses, bicycles, home-grown food, repair and recycling); and the American anarchist Murray Bookchin, who is quoted on anarchist concepts being not on y desirable but necessary for viability of the planet.

A comforting thought for anarchists is the reflection that a society advanced enough to accept the environmental imperatives of the 21st century will be obliged to reinvent anarchism as a response to them.

For a very strong case has been made by such authors as Murray and Bookchin and Alan Carter that anarchism is the only political ideology capable of addressing the challenges posed by our new green consciousness to the accepted range of political ideas. Anarchism becomes more and more relevant for the new century.

Summary

Colin Ward put a friendly face on British anarchism for decades. In this book he has constructed an introduction to anarchism along the lines that he himself worked for in his own life. Not a doctrinaire ideology based on some historical strain of anarchism, but a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, attempt to elucidate how the various ideas forming the anarchist view can be useful in modern, even 21st-century, society. Ward ultimately was one who, rather than fear the future, strove to nourish seeds which he believed could make the future better than the present.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>

Last week, I was doing a workshop on safety culture in organisations, and was stressing the need for moving from a "bureaucratic" culture where everything was dependent on strict adherence to rules to an "aware" culture where safety was inbuilt into the consciousness of the employees, when I had an epiphany: if we extend the same logic to governments, democracy is needed only as long as people are not enlightened. The moment that happens, we don't need a government, as everyone will take care of everyone else. In fact, the logical form of government in an enlightened culture is anarchy!

Now, most people would get upset at this statement, because anarchism has got horrendously bad press; mainly due to the action of a bunch of anarchists at the turn of the Twentieth Century, who believed that the way to bring in the anarchist revolution was to assassinate monarchs, princes and presidents. Sadly this is only one facet of a serious philosophy which has had its learned adherents and which refuses to die.

The Oxford "Very Short Introduction" series is my go-to resource for first information on any subject that I don't have a clue about - and thankfully, one on Anarchism by Colin Ward was available. This book is a great primer on the subject - though you may need something more substantial if you are already up to date on the subject.

The author says

The word ‘anarchy’ comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until 1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his political and social ideology.
***
For anarchists the state itself is the enemy, and they have applied the same interpretation to the outcome of every revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is not merely because every state
keeps a watchful and sometimes punitive eye on its dissidents, but because every state protects the privileges of the powerful.

The main thinkers of the anarchist tradition were:

1. William Godwin (1756–1836), English Philosopher
2. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), French Propagandist
3. Michael Bakunin (1814–76), Russian Revolutionary
4. Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), Russian Geographer turned Political Philosopher

Even though individual differences existed, all these thinkers were against the idea of the monolithic state and supported independent communes of mutually dependent human beings.

The mainstream of anarchist propaganda for more than a century has been anarchist-communism, which argues that property in land, natural resources, and the means of production should be held in mutual control by local communities, federating for innumerable joint purposes with other communes. It differs from state socialism in opposing the concept of any central authority.

Of course, in the modern world, laissez-faire capitalism and religious fundamentalism are ruling the roost. Man's essential distrust of one another has led to him joining one camp or the other and demonising his rivals - and ironically, the same individualistic ideas which gave rise to anarchism also spawned right-wing libertarianism of the Ayn Rand variety, where the advancement of one's own selfish needs are seen as the ultimate aim of life. However, anarchism has not lost out fully. In our climate change resistance movements, in civil disobedience against right-wing governments across the world, and in tiny local experiments like the women's "Kudumbasree" movement in Kerala, one can still see the flame of the original philosophy burning, albeit stuttering a little.

Is anarchism good? After reading the book, I would reply with a resounding YES!, provided it is implemented as its original advocates wanted. Is anarchism practical? The idealist in me wants to say yes, but the realist responds with a firm no. But hey, I can still dream, can't I?

As John Lennon once said: "Imagine..."

This is the book you want to give to someone to show them very quickly that Anarchism is not a crackpot nonsense idea. It does a great job outlining the basic anarchist concepts like worker control, decentralization of political control and economic activity, and skepticism of power and hierarchy. Of course, as usual its vague on the specifics, but what can one really expect from a very short introduction? Anyway if someone wants to look up the specifics of anarchist organization its not difficult to find online.

There was a lot of great information in here about the practical influence of anarchism, which I think is the book's strongest point. For instance, office managers are more often now turning to anarchist models of workplace management, because they simply allow for more freedom and productivity than hierarchal models. Anarchism also helped normalize egalitarian clothing and marriage norms. Anarchic models also provided for social welfare, medical care, and public education before the state. In fact, the state co-opted the anarchic models, and forced the unwilling population into them, all the while degrading the quality and flexibility of the service in favor of centralized control and subservience to the general goals of the state authorities. This is all very uncontroversial history, but its not widely known outside of anarchist circles, and the specific scholarly communities which deal with the histories of these subject areas.

Anarchist models of federation are also becoming increasingly relevant, both as organizations like the E.U. seek to grapple with questions of localism and regionalism, and as the concept of the nation state loses relevance in a world of electronic global commerce. It is also interesting to note that many anarchists, despite their opposition to states and capitalist entities, used the operation of international law and transport, and the operation of firms on the market, to illustrate how non-centrally directed, action through unhom*ogonized institutions could result in order and prosperity.

One hang up. It doesn't give much credence to Stirner or egoist anarchism. The author cannot find Stirner comprehensible, which admittedly, is a problem, but he is no worse than any other German Idealist. Additionally, the author seems to discount American libertarianism, of the non-socialist variety. I think the author is too dismissive of this tradition. He basically writes them off as capitalist apologists and doesn't seem very familiar with their more radical literature.

Overall though, great work. It portrays anarchism as rational, practical, and historically grounded. It is revolutionary, but not utopian (any more.) And in a world where authoritarian, centralized, hierarchal modes of living have resulted in chaos and tyranny, anarchism seems increasingly relevant.

O ya and you can read it in a couple hours.

A basically sound introduction to Anarchism as a political philosophy and as mode of political action but I have my criticisms.

The disappointment is that a cool analysis of an important trend in Western political philosophy is, in the end, bent to appropriate the entire anarchist tradition for a range of current social movements, some appropriately (chapter eight on social and economic protest) and some much less so (chapters nine and ten on federalist and green politics).

Yes, there is a link between the history of anarchism and, say, the green movement but there is a bit of convenient whitewashing going on here - fascistic thinking and technocratic dabbling have played as much of a role in greenery as ever did philosophies of human liberation.

At the end of the day, anarchism is an act of faith in human nature (one that is hard to square with the facts of human psychology) and a general spirit of struggle against oppresive systems - capitalist and state socialist - which is where it is most fruitful. It is also an intellectual deconstruction of great abstractions like the 'nation' although it can sometimes merely replace one set of fictions with another.

Ward's account of anarchism and its meanings is excellent until he gets closer to our own times. Perhaps Ward is just too 'engaged' in his subject. He is a 'veteran anarchist' himself so it is like asking Hobsbawm to write on the history of the Communist Party.

It seems to be a trend for publishers to accept books that are ostensibly objective but in fact are partially polemical (see our review of What Pagans Believe) in a contemporary context. Frankly, I just find it hard to trust the assessments in the final two chapters whereas I am very happy to rely wholly on the first eight.

One appreciates that this is a 'very short introduction' but Ward does a disservice to sympathetic readers in producing, towards the very end, after his considerable insights into the nineteenth and early twentieth century anarchist tradition, a rather selective account of its alleged contemporary manifestations which gently merge into what can only be described as implicit and selective policy proposals.

The sweeping aside of the American libertarian tradition in chapter seven is one concern but the adoption of federalist/regionalist and green agenda are just plain a-historical - this is a selective reading of the 'now' for subtle near-polemical ends.

To appropriate anarchism for the concept of a United States (regions) of Europe (implied through a reading of Bakunin), as such a term might now be understood, is disturbingly potty, given current realities, and to believe that anarchists were necessarily going to be into green issues - maybe Nazi Minister of Agriculture Walther Darre should have been an anarchist, huh! - is just plain daft.

Europeanism and environmentalism do have some anarchist elements but not nearly so much as Ward would like to claim - while his earlier attempt to 'diss' modern American economic libertarians as not mainstream anarchists may be true today but many an artisanal Proudhonist and nineteenth century opponent of Marx would have felt closer to them than to the interfering social movement protesters of today. This is the rejigging of ideological history on a grand scale.

We think that this implicit polemic is unhelpful - either the reader deserves a considered assessment from outside a movement or an obviously engaged history that masquerades as nothing else. The book ultimately seems intended to persuade and not to inform. However, it is well written and engaging, with material on the great names and events of anarchist history that deserves to be part of any civilised person's general knowledge.

There are fuller accounts of the history of anarchism (to be reviewed, we hope, later) and there are other more powerful intellectual investigations of what anarchism means today. This book has to be seen as a quick second division guide, a useful and slightly frustrating half-way house, well worth reading for many of the facts, a proper appreciation of the extra-European dimension to anarchism and for some sensible particular judgements and insights into contemporary alternative modes of thinking but it is not to be placed in the first rank by any means.